


The Deliquescence Of Modern Time

by Nope



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-05-23
Updated: 2005-05-23
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:47:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25786099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nope/pseuds/Nope
Summary: Pansy sees the future in droplets of purple tincture.





	The Deliquescence Of Modern Time

Bella twists on the cross, all black and white and turning red. Pansy sees the future in droplets of purple tincture, the juice of dead berries staining her lips. Somewhere, somewhen, Draco is yelling, is screaming her name. It bursts from him in a crimson shine. She bucks against the rough green of the silk sheets. Somewhere, Narcissa is crying, her golden dress ripped and falling off a pale cream shoulder. Draco looks washed out, silver against the black roof. She can hear the susurrus of the lake above them. They live below water. Through the stones, she can see the squid, neon tentacles coiling and uncoiling. Draco is still screaming, is always screaming. She falls. Hermione is saying

-the three warning signs of temporal psychosis are

-i know what they are

-what are you eating -- no, don't look down

-toast, butter and honey. it's what I always have

-pansy

-i know what i'm doing

she says and

-don't say my name

Draco smashes the door down and screams her name and she smiles up at him and squeezes the dropper. And six months from now, eight, fifteen, Draco is still screaming, on his knees, black-green shining snake coiling and burning into his skin, all hiss and pop and crackle. Red eyes burning down and a year sideways bushy brown hair falls across them and gets pushed irritably back and not-just-Hermione is saying something about how she always loved books. Possession is nine-tenths of the law, she thinks, and starts laughing in a second-year classroom and Flitwick's saying something about overdoing the Cheering Charms and thirty-two years later she's crying in the ruins of an empty house.

-i'm not talking about divination, i'm talking about potions and arithmancy

-what you're talking about is

-i know how you spent your third year

-really

She's spread out. Like a deck of cards, cut into slices and scattered. Fifty-two card pick-up. Fingers all over her. Hyper sensitivity is a sign of temporal psychosis. Three days from now, she's curled up rasping on a St. Mungo's bed starched cotton tearing at her like sandpaper. Four months before, she's clenched tight around Blaise's cock and lying to him with every breath, every moan, every word. When she looks up, she sees Hermione, pale and flushed, all at once, eyes hard, bright, calculating. Her hands clench on the table, the book, in the sheets, around the glass, the necklace, the throat, the thighs.

-i hate you

she says, and

-i need your help

Snape is talking about alcohol solutions. Ingredients are solid. Potions are liquid. One becomes the other, transmuted, flowing. Daddy's alcohol solution is a fifth of whiskey and later, so much later, she laughs wildly and snatches the cut crystal decanter and whips it across the room to smash next to Narcissa's head who does not flinch, just keeps on smiling that dead smile and telling her there's no way out, and just before this she squeezes and purple drops start fires on her tongue, and before, and before, and before, and before, and somewhen Hermione is grabbing her wrist and pulling her aside and whispering, harsh and too loud:

-you're addicted

-i can handle it

-some day you won't come back

-you say that like it's a bad thing

-pansy

-i need to know. i need to know so i can change it. so i can save them

-you can't change anything

-you believed before

-i didn't

-fuck you

She comes to herself at thirteen, at fifty, at twenty-seven. She comes to herself and she makes herself come, twin bodies, stretched by age and by fingers, awkwardly pushing and twisting and rubbing until she finds, until they find that perfect angle, that perfect weight and depth and rhythm, rubbing and grinding against each other until the world melts in slick heat and blinding colours, into streaks of red and green.

-you betrayed us

he says, and in this branch it's

-we've been betrayed

and here he's already dead and it's Harry saying

-we won

standing on the broken, blood soaked ground, and it's him again, red-eyed, or her, or Draco, or Blaise coughing and sliding down the wall, or Bellatrix, naked and nailed up, laughing and broken and bitter on her tongue, and she backtracks and takes another branch. Takes another drop. Purple. Tinct. Tinct. Hermione is Minister and dead and hero and Auror and just another dead muggle girl and eleven and seventeen and forty and three and nineteen and eight. Try another branch. Make another choice. Twenty-eight years down this one, Ron Weasley rules the world. France is a funeral home, Asia a graveyard. The future coils and uncoils. Draco is screaming.

-loss of focus is a sign of temporal psychosis

-its to be expected

-you have to stop

-i can't. i won't

It's always better and worse or, really, neither, just different. All paths lead to Rome. Except, she is Rome, and there are too many paths, and they lead everywhere and she could just find the one she wants if she had more time, if she had less time. Draco is saying her name at any one of a hundred thousand points and he's dead at three times as many. Everyone dies. After the service, she finds the book in her Grandmother's library, the lists of potions, poisons, effects and side-effects. And seven years later, she's probably Voldemort's top assassin. Seven years later she's probably a world-renowned Healer. Seven years later she's probably mad and broken and curled up on a bed of nails.

-draco? what do you want to be when you grow up

-'m gonna be just like my father

-oh

-what you gonna be pans?

A tree, she thinks, roots spreading down, branches spreading up, a single, fixed trunk. Inevitably, fate. Each future blossoming. Faint at first. Half dreaming Then brighter. Awake. In classes. At lunch. After-images, side-images, before-images, all around people. And she should give up but sometimes at the corner of her eyes she sees the goal and so she has to take another drop, just to be sure. Everything's looping, repeating. Variations on a theme. Rewriting each others' lives over and over.

-this is what you have to do

she tells herself, future ghost, moving backwards

-this is how you fix it

and each time it isn't she goes further forward, further back, down into the darkness between.

-move. there. right there.

and

-please, oh, please

and

-oh god oh fuck your tongue

and

-there's no way to fight

she says, at twelve, at thirty, at sixteen, and she says

-fight anyway

because there's nothing else to do. Take a drop. Make a wish. Hermione says

-when they cart you off to st. mungo's, what then?

-i cut my wrists on a broken cup, i escape during a death eater raid, i'm cured and come home untouched and join the ministry or the war effort or return to hogwarts or

and on and on because she doesn't know which answer to pick. She can see them all and they're all wrong, melting and blurring and intertwined like their arms and legs and tongues, pansies made of pansies made of pansies, and then she makes another choice because there's nothing else to do. Just this, over and over, a little further nowhere every time. And Hermione says

-please, pansy

and Draco smashes through the door, screaming her name, throat raw and bleeding, eyes bulging in broken sockets, Dark Mark flickering in and out on his clean, blood drenched arm.

Pansy smiles her rictus smile and takes another drop.


End file.
